Quick, cool decapitations are emerging as the chic way to off bad guys on the big screen. Here, our connoisseur of head-lopping cinema, Joe Queenan, discusses which films feature the most fearless head cuts and suggests a few flicks that could have benefited from a noggin chop.
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IN THE OPENING SEQUENCE OF ANTONIO BANDERAS'S CRAZY IN ALABAMA, MELANIE GRIFFITH TELLS HER SWAMP-TRASH MAMA THAT WHEN A DOMESTIC DISPUTE WITH HER HUSBAND COULD NOT BE RESOLVED, SHE HAD NO CHOICE BUT TO CUT OFF HIS HEAD. Her mother reacts with horror and disbelief, not so much because her abusive son-in-law has been slain but because of the grotesque fashion in which he has been dispatched from this Vale of Tears. That, plus the fact that Griffith is still tooling around Dixie with his head on the back seat. It is yet another of those classic instances where the people inside a movie never seem to go to the movies themselves, and are thus shocked and scandalized at things that movie audiences take for granted.
In the past couple of years, cinematic decapitation has become so commonplace that it barely raises an eyebrow anymore. Just this past summer, a head went flying off a soldier's shoulders in The Patriot, a severed noggin got chucked into the mud in Gladiator (with a second coconut getting spliced off in a coliseum later), the obligatory cerebellar skullduggery took place in Highlander: Endgame (the latest in a series devoted almost entirely to the joys of decapitation) and a fatally perky Jennifer Love Hewitt clone got her thinking cap eighty-sixed in Scary Movie.
Not long before these films were released, heads of all sizes and descriptions were separated from their shoulders in Sleepy Hollow, a head was eaten al dente by a giant crocodile in Lake Placid and a head was devoured by a mutant sea bass in the first Austin Powers. And that's not even mentioning the memorable decapitations in Braveheart, The Mask of Zorro and Se7en.
Why has head-hunting become such a popular plot device in contemporary movies? In large part because the psychological groundwork for this on-screen mayhem was laid carefully some time ago. Back in 1994, I wrote an article for this magazine drawing attention to the amazing number of ears that had been sliced off actors' heads in recent years. At the time, the powers-that-be in Hollywood seemed to believe that the general viewing public would probably accept an ear being chopped off or shot off or gnawed off here and there (Reservoir Dogs, Vincent & Theo, The Godfather: Part III, The Last Temptation of Christ, Blue Velvet, Hard Target) but was not yet ready to see the entire head untethered. But since that time, decapitation has steadily become more popular in motion pictures, while auricular trauma has virtually disappeared. In a way, it's amazing that this evolutionary leap from partial cranial mutilation to full medullary trauma didn't occur sooner. Look at it from the point of view of the person wielding the ax, sword or carving knife. While it is true that cutting off a person's ear sends a powerful message to the victim that the perpetrator of the atrocity is not to be trifled with, ear mutilation is of dubious value as an intimidation technique because it leaves the victim fully capable of retaliation. Decapitation, by contrast, closes the books once and for all. Moreover, cutting off somebody's head does not carry the odious stigma that chopping off his ear or tearing off his nose or ripping out his tongue or slicing off his penis often does. Nobody going to see Gladiator thinks any less of Russell Crowe just because he hacks off a fellow combatant's skull, whereas if he'd cut off his rivals ears or hacked off his nuts or detached his nostrils or ripped out his heart, people might have found such actions a tad dysfunctional.
Decapitation in movies is nothing new, of course. As a plot device, it has been a staple of motion pictures almost from the beginning, with movies about the French Revolution and St. John the Baptist furnishing innumerable opportunities for heads to go flying. Yet in most of these films, because of the relatively primitive technology available at the time, the cerebral cleaving is seen from a distance or not at all. I can well recall as a child being terribly disappointed by the shoddy head-loosening work in A Tale of Two Cities, a failure I attribute to the fact that the movie was made by English people rather than the French, who really know their way around a guillotine. (For some genuinely superb decapitation footage, check out Danton and Queen Margot.) I was also very upset as a child when I did not get to see John the Baptist's head on a silver platter in King of Kings. Though raised a devout Catholic, I was anxious to see the great Evangelist pay the ultimate price for his impertinence, in part because the actor playing John the Baptist (Robert Ryan) was such a know-it-all, but also because I was quite impressed by the young woman playing Salome and felt that her memorably lascivious Trans-Galilean can-can earned her more of a reward than the usual 12 sesterces and a pat on the ass.
The first time I saw a decapitation movie that really delivered the goods was in 1961, when a horror film called The Head was released. In this super-low-budget affair, a scientist who has developed a non-FDA-approved technique for keeping the head of a dog alive is himself decapitated by his untrustworthy colleague. Because the scientists brain is bristling with brilliant ideas, his colleague decides to keep it alive by connecting the severed head to a bunch of down-market electrodes. The unfortunate genius then spends the remainder of the movie complaining about how horrible it is to be decapitated. Although the film is unbelievably cheap-looking and the "severed" head is not at all realistic-looking, The Head is important for two reasons. One, as opposed to earlier films I had seen in which the removal of the protagonist's noodle invariably signals his departure from the film, The Head broke entirely new ground by placing a talking, albeit detached, head squarely at the center of the dramatic action. Second, the film introduced me to the concept of the chatty decapitatee, a character who will be seen again in films as varied as _Highlander--_The Final Dimension, Scary Movie and Crazy in Alabama. So effective is this plot device that I am firmly convinced we will one day see a remake of The Head in which a fiendish scientist grafts the head of Barbra Streisand onto the body of Bette Midler--or vice versa--just to see how much of this crap the public can take.
Khartoum is another decapitation film worthy of a heads-up, not only because Charlton Heston's skull gets popped off, but because it includes the classic "message in a basket" (Laurence Olivier shows Heston two severed heads in hopes of scaring him out of town), a gambit that would be borrowed by Mel Gibson nearly 30 years later in Braveheart when a basket carrying a severed head gets sent to the king's castle as an announcement of their royal defeat.
Equally worthy of mention is Sam Peckinpah's brutal, nihilistic 1974 release Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. Here, Warren Oates plays a likable bistro owner who, through a series of unexpected mishaps, ends up driving around rural Mexico with the head of a dead womanizer riding shotgun in the passenger seat. It is worth recalling that Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia was a bomb when it was released a quarter-century ago, as was the film that shamelessly borrowed the theme of the neurotic motorist accompanied by a severed head, last year's Crazy in Alabama. The twin failures suggest that severed heads as traveling companions don't cut it.
When pressured to pick the greatest decapitation movie of all time, purists give the nod either to The Omen, in which David Warner's head is separated from his body by a sheet of plate glass in an "accident" that has Satan's fingerprints all over it, or to Conan the Barbarian, the 1982 cult classic that launched Arnold Schwarzenegger's otherwise unnecessary career. Much as I enjoy The Omen, it only has one beheading, whereas Conan has two; and since I almost always prefer quantity to quality, I have reserved my highest praise for Arnie's bafflingly impressive screen performance.
Conan is the only film I know that both begins and ends with a decapitation, thus achieving a seamless post-cranial unity. At the beginning of the film, a surprisingly multi-cultural horde of marauding barbarians descend upon young Conan's village and butcher everyone except the boy and his mother. Expecting to be slaughtered like the rest of her tribe, Mrs. Conan raises her sword in a vaguely menacing gesture. But arch-villain James Earl Jones is far too clever to risk a mano-a-mano confrontation with a lioness defending her cub. Mesmerizing her with an expression of unexpected warmth, Jones turns to go, acting as if he has shed enough blood. This feint is just convincing enough to put Arnie's mother off her guard, and the next thing you know the kid is clasping the hand of an entirely headless mother, while her Neanderthalic noggin drops slowly to the ground.
Talk about formative childhood experiences.
For a film starring Schwarzenegger, this decapitation sequence is unusually artistic, much more visually opulent than the crude hugger-mugger one normally sees in his films. But artistry need not concern us here. What interests us is that in the climactic confrontation, Jones uses a similar trick to try to sucker-behead Arnie, but this time it doesn't work. Instead, Arnie lops off his nemesis's skull, holds it up for all his followers to see, and then chucks it down a flight of stairs in an unforgettable sequence that would be recycled a generation later in Gladiator. By chopping off the head of the man who decapitated his mother, Conan achieves the kind of "closure" that any of us who grew up with decapitated mothers would naturally seek.
Decapitations figure prominently in all of the films in the Highlander series, for the simple reason that the villains in the films can only be killed by having their heads chopped off. Though a beheading buff of the first water, I have never found these movies especially interesting. Decapitation works best when you don't entirely expect it, when it comes as a bit of a jolt, as it does in Black Rain, The Patriot and Se7en. The only film in the Highlander series that is at all interesting is Highlander--The Final Dimension, in which a decapitated Oriental warrior who is sort of a poor man's Yoda continues to speak derisively to his murderer (Mario Van Peebles) long after he is deceased. But this sort of posthumous dissing probably happens all the time in Mario Van Peebles movies.
It cannot be denied that some decapitation scenes resonate with audiences more than others. Much of this has to do with who is getting his head cut off and how much of the severed head you actually get to see. For example, Andy Garcia is probably the best-looking actor to ever get his head hewed off in a movie. But it's important to remember that in the memorable sequence from Black Rain (which should have been called Bring Me the Head of Andy Garcia or Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, But if You Can't Find It, Andy's Head Will Do) we never actually see his head pop free. Very annoying, indeed. The same criticism can be made of John Huston's otherwise excellent 1975 film The Man Who Would Be King, where we do not in fact witness Sean Connery's decapitation, but merely see a rotting skull--which could belong to anybody--at the very end of the film. (Decapitation buffs, take note: Connery is, to my knowledge, the only actor of any consequence to be decapitated in two films, as he also parts company with the old coconut in the original Highlander)
This brings us to the contemporary era of decapitation films, which is a decidedly mixed bag. Although beheadings have become much more common in recent films, largely because computer imaging makes this sort of thing far easier, the true head-detaching potential of the idiom has not yet been realized. Up to this point, directors seem content to lift their decapitation shots from earlier films, confident that their youthful audiences have not seen them. For example, while I thoroughly enjoyed the head-being-tossed-down-to-the-ground scene at the beginning of Gladiator, it's hard to see how it's much of an improvement over James Earl Jones's bouncing skull in Conan the Barbarian. The head-in-the-basket gambit in Braveheart is an effective dramatic touch, but it is nonetheless a direct lift from Khartoum. And the severed head that keeps blabbing away after being separated from its body in Scary Movie is merely a variation on similar scenes from Highlander--The Final Dimension, Salome's Last Dance and The Head.
Other decapitation movies are even less impressive. Both Austin Powers and Lake Placid include sequences where a human head is bitten off by a monster from the deep. This is good. Unfortunately, the directors merely show the audience the headless body, neglecting to display the head itself. This is a serious, serious error. Cinematic decapitations are most effective when you actually get to see the expression on the victim's head. Was he surprised? Horrified? Embarrassed? Or just kind of pissed off?
The sad truth is, recent movies are littered with wasted opportunities for the director to do something truly memorable in the decapitatorial genre. Antonio Banderas, in his maiden voyage as a director in Crazy in Alabama, totally drops the ball by letting Melanie Griffith drive all across America with a severed head in a hatbox, but never once lets the audience see it. Nor does the audience ever get to see the scene where Griffith decapitates her husband with an electric carving knife she got as a Christmas gift. Roland Emmerich makes a similar error in The Patriot where a soldier's head is torn off by a cannonball early in the picture, but we never again get to see either the head or the cannonball. In this case, I think Emmerich made the classic mistake of raising the bar too high. Once that first head comes off, the audience is naturally going to want to see more of this kind of thing. After all, it's not like the English were short on cannonballs. Emmerich should have paid closer attention to Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow, where the head-severing philosophy was quite clear: the more, the merrier. In Burtons movie, heads bounce, heads fly, heads get impaled, and most important of all, heads roll.
For a clearer sense of Burton's stupendous achievement, take a gander at one of his recent competitors. Ask the average decapitation film buff to cite his greatest disappointment and he is almost certain to mention the film Se7en. This is the 1995 thriller where Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt play a pair of spectacularly ineffective detectives hot on the trail of a serial killer. At the end of the film, a delivery man hands Freeman a box containing the head of Pitt's pregnant wife Gwyneth Paltrow. Inexplicably, the director never shows us her head. Does this suck or what? Whether Paltrow had it written into her contact that her body and her head could not appear separately, or whether the director thought the ultimate head shot would have been too offensive to feminist audiences, I have no idea. But the shocking failure to show Paltrow's severed head in all its muted majesty is the biggest consumer rip-off since viewers were cheated out of an opportunity to see Helena Bonham Carters head go rolling into a ditch at the end of the 1985 Elizabethan costume drama Lady Jane. Directors have no right to trifle with audiences this way. If you're going to use decapitation as a theme in your movie, then the public has the right to see the severed head. With movies running $9.50 a pop in places like New York and Los Angeles, people expect a dead head shot.
We now arrive at the most important topic of this essay: the future of decapitation movies. In almost all the films we have touched upon so far, decapitation is a technique that coheres nicely with the film genre in which it appears._ Braveheart, Conan, Gladiator, The Patriot, Khartoum_ and the Highlander series are all action films depicting a world where the occasional severed head is to be expected; that is, societies where, if a bloody, lacerated head didn't occasionally go bouncing down the hill, the locals would start to wonder if something was wrong up in the Manor House. The problem is, in movies like these, decapitations are becoming so commonplace they are rapidly losing their shock value. What I would like to see is a gradual expansion of the technique into other genres where decapitation would come as a complete surprise. Examples? I would have loved to see Roberto Benigni's head come flying off in Life is Beautiful. In fact, I would have loved it if Benigni had a recurring nightmare about getting his head chopped off throughout the film, so that I could have seen his head come flying off more than once.
Other suggestions? If someone had taken a scimitar to Madonna's head at the beginning of The Next Best Thing, Rupert Everett might have been able to salvage something out of this mess. And had the screenwriter figured out some way to keep Madonna's decapitated body alive on life support, it would have vastly improved her acting, which is mostly done from below the head anyway.
Unexpected decapitations would be a much-appreciated addition to any Woody Allen movie, particularly if his head was the first to go. Tea With Mussolini would have been much better if Cher's head had gotten lopped off, and I think the same can be said for just about any movie starring James Spader or Woody Harrelson. Since Gwyneth Paltrow escaped being seen sans tête in Se7en, it would have been awfully nice to see both of her personalities senza testa in Sliding Doors. Finally, I would love to see a head-hunting Nora Ephron sequel called Headless in Seattle and it wouldn't matter to me whether it was Meg Ryan's or Tom Hanks's skull that came flying off. (Obviously, a double decapitation would be too much to hope for.)
One vital point needs to be made here. Though it is clear from the tone of this article that I am a huge fan of decapitation movies, I am not suggesting that the mere fact that a movie features a beheading guarantees that it will be good. Lake Placid is a mess. Se7en is idiotic. The Highlander movies bite. And the only thing that keeps Crazy in Alabama from being the worst movie of the year is the fact that Madonna made a film the same year. Yet there is something to be learned from the decapitations that occur in each of these films. And it is this: If you're going to chop off somebody's head in a movie, make damn sure that you get the right head. Call me a lunatic, but I will go to my death believing that Lake Placid could have worked if Bridget Fonda's head had come off. Similarly, I believe that Se7en would have been a whole lot more interesting if Pitt had gotten his head chopped off; with that nitwit out of the way, Freeman might have had an outside shot at solving the case. And while it is doubtful that Crazy in Alabama could ever have been a box-office hit, it would have had a much better chance of finding an audience if Griffiths head had been sniffed in a hatbox early in the film, or perhaps even before shooting began.
If anyone has any other suggestions, I'm all ears.
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Joe Queenan wrote "What Lies Beneath Ghost Story" for the October issue of Movieline.